by Sanchez, Bob
It wasn’t a footprint, but the heel of a boot.
Sam tapped harder, making tiny chips in the older cement. Was it only a boot, dumped into the cement for--God knew for what reason? Carelessness? That was impossible--no, improbable. Sam drew in his breath and hammered with all his might.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
A fissure appeared next to the boot.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
Sam’s ears rung, his bones shook, his right arm ached. For a moment the boot seemed no longer there; now it was Bin Chea’s face. God damn him, God damn his memory, God damn his wife and children. Sam had to turn the face into splinters, and the splinters into powder.
Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!
And once more for my father--
Wham!
The stair split into a dozen large pieces. Chunks fell away. Sam cleared the debris with his hands, then aimed his flashlight inside the crater.
The porch light went on and the front door opened and slammed.
“What’s all the racket? My God!”
It was Li Chang’s brother Someth; his wife and Li Chang stood in the doorway. He stood on the top step and stared down, saying nothing.
The leg looked like a ghost stepping out of his grave. It was a left leg. The pants were probably denim, and were coated with gray. Raindrops speckled the leg, which was exposed almost to the knee. The right leg was stuck in what remained of the step. Sam took a deep breath to steady himself, then looked up at Someth.
“Call the police,” he said. “I’ve found your brother-in-law.”
The police camera flashed as it captured the scene. “Now that is a stiff,” Sergeant DeVito said. “How much of this mess did you make, Sam?”
“All of it.”
“You could of waited till day shift, you know. I mean, where was this guy going in the freaking meanwhile?”
Sam’s head buzzed. Every muscle in his body had its own private grudge against him. The flashing blue lights on the cruisers reflected on the exposed leg, on the chips stuck to the victim’s jeans, on DeVito’s face. “Nobody would care about a repaired stoop! I had to see for myself, and--and--”
“Take it easy, Sam. Catch your breath.”
“I just meant to expose it the way I’d seen it before. But once I’d done that, I couldn’t stop. It couldn’t have been a footprint anyway,” he said. “The heel was in the middle of the step. The shoe disappeared into the next step. That’s why I came back to look.”
DeVito placed an arm around Sam’s shoulder. “The wife, is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s resting.”
“Look at your knuckles, for God’s sake. They’re all scraped to shit.” Sam looked down at his right hand: the skin was torn, and blood dripped from two knuckles. “We don’t need you here anymore. Where’s your car?”
“I walked.”
DeVito shook his head. “We’ll have somebody drive you home, then. But no more venting, okay? You all done venting?”
The poison in Sam’s brain must have prevented his feeling the pain in his knuckles, because now the throbbing began. It radiated all the way up his arm.
“Sam? You got it out of your system?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “For now.”
Back at his in-laws’, he cleaned off his scraped knuckles. Then he sat in a comfortable chair in the living room and stared at the television, which was off. What an idiot he was, thinking he could be a policeman like his father. For someone, catching Viseth Kim was going to be a matter of time. The little runt was stupid--there was nothing like an attack on a cop’s family to galvanize attention to a case. Still, this wasn’t worth it for Sam. Being a cop wasn’t worth it. A sharp pain shot across his forehead.
Sam had to get out while he still had a family.
Upstairs, Trish began to cry. Sam moved slowly at first, then the cries turned to screams. “Mommy, you’re bleeding. Don’t die, Mommy. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” Sam took the stairs two at a time and found Trish sitting on the bed. Her eyes were wide, and her wet cheeks glinted in the dim nightlight. Her little body shook with rapid, shallow sobs. Sam wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently back and forth. “Don’t let Mommy die,” she said, over and over.
“Mommy’s not going to die, sweetheart. Mommy’s going to be okay.”
“Will Patricia be all right?” Dottie Nordstrom stood at the door and whispered, as though she didn’t want to intrude on a private moment.
He nodded. “I’ll stay with her.”
Trish’s arms reached almost around his chest, and her fingers dug against his back. Clinging for life to the edge of a cliff. Her breathing began to slow, cool puffs against his neck, and he remembered clinging to his father’s hand when he was a small boy. The poison in his veins began to melt away in her embrace.
“You said you wouldn’t leave me, Daddy,” Trish said.
“I’m not leaving you, sweetheart. I’ll stay with you the rest of the night. I’ll just bring up a chair from the kitchen.”
“Get me Courtney, Daddy.” Trish looked up with pleading eyes.
“Your dolls are at home, sweetheart. I can’t go get Courtney and stay with you at the same time. Tomorrow we’ll get her.”
Sam sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand until she fell asleep.
At around five a.m. he dozed upright and dreamed.
The colors are stark: the leaves too green, the sky too blue, the mourning veils too black. A jeep burns and sends up billows of black smoke. A hundred cops mourn a brother officer, and Tommy Wilkins winks. You more or less had it coming, he says. Two coffins are lowered into the moist black earth. Someone unwelcome is here. Is that you, Viseth? No, someone much older--Bin Chea, who wears a red and white checkered krama around his neck. A third open grave sits and waits. I’ve had enough of you, Julie says. Trish buys an orange ice from the man on the cyclopousse while she holds Courtney by the feet, draining the doll’s blood into the soil. Sam wants to chase Bin Chea and strangle him with the scarf, but he cannot get around the beckoning grave. If he tries, he will fall in.
“Go away!” Sam awoke himself with a yell.
He showered and shaved, hoping to wash his depression down the drain, but it didn’t help. How could he tell Trish that Courtney was a victim of Daddy’s work, that Courtney had caught the full force of Viseth’s rage and that half of her had been driven through the back of the couch?
Later, Sam drank coffee as black as his mood. Trish was still in the bed her grandmother had unfolded last night. His spoon clinked against the inside of the cup, and the sugar bowl remained untouched. Dottie said good morning, slipped an onion bagel in front of him, and went about getting ready for work. He forced a smile, and she did the same.
Eric stumbled into the kitchen, wearing pin-striped pants, a tee shirt, and a pair of withered suspenders. He was tall and thin, with a face that was all angles and creases in a carpet of stubble. He capped the vodka bottle and poured himself a cup of black coffee. As far as Sam could tell, there was no resemblance at all between father and daughter.
“My granddaughter okay?”
“She had bad dreams. Who wouldn’t?” Some people were made to be kept apart, like Sam and Eric. Sam’s confidence vanished around his father-in-law.
“Any kid would.” The old man gulped his coffee and looked Sam in the eye. “She and her mother needed protection and their old man wasn’t there. Of course she’d wake up screaming in the middle of the damn night.”
“I feel guilty--”
“You should feel guilty, you son of a bitch.” Sam felt like a dartboard, and the old man was scoring tens.
“Then why did you let me stay here last night?”
Eric nodded toward his wife. “It was her idea, not mine. You don’t exist as far as I’m concerned, and one of these days my little girl is going to come to her senses about you. Anyway, my granddaughter is always welcome here. If you had gotten Julie killed, I’d fight you for custody of Trish. And win.”
&n
bsp; “If I had--wait a minute.” Sam’s head pounded as though it were inside a vise, and he felt the urge to grab the old man’s skinny little neck and snap it. “You’re not splitting up my family. Never.”
“I told her not to marry a cop.”
“We were already married when I joined the force.”
“But you were just dying to wear a uniform and carry a gun.”
“You told her not to marry an Asian.”
“I never said that. I said she should go to graduate school.”
“Which she did.”
“Marry somebody with a future.”
“Which she did.”
“There’s no future under a granite slab.” Eric poked his finger at Sam’s chest.
Sam had to shut up right now before he upended the kitchen table and proved himself unfit once and for all.
“I’m going out for a few minutes,” he said. He drove to the grocery store to buy milk and cereal for Trish’s breakfast. While he was there, he called his landlord from a pay phone.
When he came back Trish was at the kitchen table, staring at a bagel as though it were a moon rock. He tossed the bagel into the trash and poured Trish a bowl of Count Chocula cereal with whole milk. Where did they come up with rock-hard bagels for five-year-olds? It was a wonder Julie didn’t starve as a kid.
Trish ate the cereal. “Is Mommy going to die?” she asked. Sam hugged her and said no.
“I want to go to the beach, Daddy,” she announced. “With you and Mommy and Courtney.” Her voice was firm, as though she could will it to happen.
“We’ll have to wait for Mommy to get a little better, I think. There’s a nice park nearby. Would you like to play there, you and me? We can go from there to the hospital.”
“Yes. I want to bring Courtney.”
“No, honey. Home is very messy right now. I’ll go and buy you a new doll.”
“Daddy, don’t leave me!” Trish began to cry, and Sam’s heart sunk to his shoes.
Would he regret what he did next?
After thanking his mother-in-law, he strapped Trish in with her seatbelt and drove home. Trish brightened at the prospect of hugging her best friend Courtney the way her father hugged her on the way up the apartment steps.
“Sweetheart, I don’t want you to look at the mess, okay? Promise me you’ll close your eyes.”
“I promise.” She held her palms flat against her eyes.
The landlord was inside, cleaning up as well as he could. The living room carpet was rolled up to the couch, where there was no Courtney. “I’m looking for Patricia’s doll, Mr. Lassiter.”
“You mean the one on the couch? It’s in the trash, what’s left of it.” Trish gasped. Sam felt her body tense in his arms, and she tried to turn and look.
“Remember your promise,” he said. “It’s very important.” Trish shook in his arms as he emptied a shoebox full of rent receipts on the kitchen table and pulled Courtney out of the wastebasket.
Then she turned her head and screamed. He placed Courtney inside the shoebox and taped it shut, then stroked Trish’s hair.
The telephone rang. Sam let it ring.
Ten minutes later, they arrived at the park along the Merrimack River. They avoided the asphalt path and walked together in the grass, her hand wrapped around his little finger. In her other arm, she held the shoebox. He inhaled the scent of newly-mown grass under his feet. Nearby was the Sampas Pavilion, where crowds had celebrated the Fourth of July a few weeks before, listening to live music and eating ice cream and enjoying the glory of a summer evening. Trish had dozed on Sam’s shoulder while Sam and Julie watched the moonlight reflecting off the river.
Today was quiet. In the middle of the river, two crews of rowers tried to muscle past each other, oars dipping in unison. Nearby, a young mother with a baby carriage rested on a park bench.
“Is Courtney dead, Daddy?”
“The man came and ruined her. I’m sorry.”
“Courtney’s dead!” Trish began to sob.
Sam ached for Trish as he ran his fingers through her hair. “I’ll buy you a brand new doll,” he said.
“I don’t want a new doll. I want Courtney back!” She pulled away and ran toward a maple tree. He caught up with her and they sat together.
“We’ll go to K-Mart and get you one just like her.”
She shook the shoebox in his face. “No! I want Courtney back!”
He felt stupid. If he and Julie had lost Trish, would they be able to replace her at K-Mart? Then why should dealing with a child’s loss be any easier?
He held her in his arms. “She’s not coming back,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Trish sat at a picnic table and poked at her hot fudge sundae lunch while Sam watched her from the pay phone. On the other end of the line, Fitchie explained that his wife Ellen was sinking. “By the way, you were right,” Fitchie said. “About the guy in the cement, name of Dith Chang. Wilkins has people tracking down who poured the step. What I hear, they’re talking to Mister Nawath Lac.”
“I think I know what that one’s about.”
“You think they’ve got their man?”
“Nawath could be involved, he has the calluses for that kind of work.”
“Building tombstones, yeah, but why?”
“Stop working,” Sam said. “Your family needs you.”
“Me stop working, what the hell are you doing?”
Sam and Trish went to see Julie that afternoon, walking hand in hand down the hospital corridor. At the door to Julie’s room, Trish pulled away from Sam and ran to kiss her mother. “You look awful, Mommy,” she said.
“I know, sweetheart. Mommy is a sorry sight right now.”
“Are you going to die?”
“No, honey. I’ll get better before you know it.” She looked at Sam, her eyes betraying pain. “Kids do get right to the point, don’t they?”
He bent down and kissed her. “She wants you back, just as I do. How do you feel?”
“Like they sandblasted my leg.”
A hospital aide brought a coloring book and some crayons to keep Trish busy. In the other bed, the cancer patient moaned. “Sam, I’m so scared,” Julie said. “Why was that man after us?”
“We think he may have killed Bin Chea.”
“Yes? And?”
“And wants to get rid of the investigator.”
“Namely you. They catch him?”
“They went to his house and to several friends’ houses. No one’s found him yet.”
Her face turned from dour to somber. “Now the whole family is fair game. Even Trish.”
Sam sat quietly next to her bed. His family had been fair game before. First for Angka, and now for a punk across town. Or maybe they were Angka’s target again.
“Don’t keep Trish in here too long,” Julie finally said. “A hospital’s too depressing for a little girl.”
When they left, Sam found himself driving past the ramshackle property of Bin Chea. That he saw Nawath walking down the street hardly mattered now. His eyes blurred a little at thoughts of what he had lost and gained over the years. How could he ever weigh the events one against another, the good against the bad? If he had never met Bin Chea, would his father have lived? Would Sam have met Julie, fathered Trish? The joys and the sorrows of life were painfully intertwined. Sam glanced in the rear-view mirror as if glimpsing his past, and saw Nawath entering the old building.
A short while later, Sam and Trish arrived at the Nordstroms’. “I didn’t tell Mommy Courtney died. She’d be too sad.” Trish sniffled, and he hugged her.
“You’re a big, brave girl,” he said.
“Is Courtney in heaven, Daddy?”
Courtney’s remains lay in a coffin with a Thom McAn label on it. “I have a sister in heaven,” he said. “Maybe they’ll be together. It might help to have a funeral so that you can say goodbye. I’ll have to ask grandma and grandpa if it’s okay to bury Courtney in their yard.�
��
“You have a sister? What’s her name?”
“Sarapon.”
“Why is she in heaven?”
Sam took a deep breath. “We should go to the beach tomorrow,” he said.
“Why is she in heaven, Daddy?”
“Terrible people came and took her away.”
“Like the man who came for Mommy?”
“Very much like him, yes.”
“Why didn’t you stop them, Daddy?”
The question stabbed at his heart. “They had guns. I only had my hands.” A hollow excuse, nothing more.
“Will they come for me, too?”
He pressed his cheek against her head. “I’ll never let them do that.”
That evening Eric told Sam that a burial was stupid, but looked at Trish’s tears and told her yes. Dottie suggested a spot at the edge of her flower garden. When Sam saw the place, he surprised himself with a smile. “Dottie, I need to go out by myself for a while. Would you mind watching Trish?”
In the morning, Sam and Trish went out to the back yard shed and found a spade.
Inside the stone border of Dottie’s flower garden was a small patch that she had not filled with Shasta daisies, dahlias, phlox, and alyssum in mounds of red and white. A pair of bumblebees danced from blossom to blossom. Trish sat cross-legged, her eyes dripping tears onto the coffin that rested in her lap.
After Courtney’s burial, Sam plucked a pair of daisies and handed one to Trish. “Let’s lay them on top,” he said. They did, then sat arm-in-arm on the grass.
“Courtney was a wonderful dancer,” Sam said. “In Cambodia we have a story about dancers. Would you like to hear it?”
Trish nodded.
“They are called apsaras,” he began. “They are beautiful ladies who live in heaven.
“One day a long time ago, they came down to earth for a visit. The king of Cambodia had a most wonderful garden, and they wanted to see it. The apsaras wore gold crowns with jewels that shimmered like all the stars in the sky. The fabrics in their dresses were yellow like gold, green like emeralds, and red like the finest rose petals.